Reuniting public health and medicine: the University of New Mexico School of Medicine Public Health Certificate.

The University of New Mexico School of Medicine (UNMSOM) sought to train medical students in public health concepts, knowledge, and skills as a means of improving the health of communities statewide. Faculty members from every UNMSOM department collaborated to create and integrate a public health focus into all years of the medical school curriculum. They identified key competencies and developed new courses that would synchronize students' learning public health subjects with the mainstream medical school content. New courses include: Health Equity: Principles of Public Health; Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Evidence-Based Practice; Community-Based Service Learning; and Ethics in Public Health. Students experiencing the new courses, first in pilot and then final forms, gave high quantitative ratings to all courses. Some students' qualitative comments suggest that the Public Health Certificate has had a profound transformative effect. Instituting the integrated Public Health Certificate at UNMSOM places it among the first medical schools to require all its medical students to complete medical school with public health training. The new UNMSOM Public Health Certificate courses reunite medicine and public health in a unified curriculum.